


we make a pair of parentheses

by virtuosity



Category: Figure Skating RPF
Genre: A Life in Vignettes, Alternate Universe - Soulmates, Angst with a Happy Ending, F/M, Slow Burn, Soulmarks
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-20
Updated: 2018-09-20
Packaged: 2019-07-14 13:16:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,829
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16041218
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/virtuosity/pseuds/virtuosity
Summary: Her mark settled just after they met, the dark jumble of letters unscrambling into one simple, small word. While everyone around them couldn’t help but notice that it matched the one on his, no one said anything about it.





	we make a pair of parentheses

**Author's Note:**

> Well, I finally did it. I've been working on this since February and wondering if I would ever finish it, let alone post it. This isn't my first fic, but it's my first RPF and I'm a coward who made a separate account because people are mean about RPF, so I guess that's where I am now. 
> 
> I know there are other Soulmate AUs out there, and I've been steadfastly refusing to read them for fear of any kind of crossover, so if there is any similarity to anything anyone else has written it is completely accidental. Now I finally get to go back and read them, so I'm happy about that! 
> 
> Let me know if you like, if you think it's weird, just really if you think anything about it all!

  _Hi._

_Hi._

* * *

Her mark settled just after they met, the dark jumble of letters unscrambling into one simple, small word. While everyone around them couldn’t help but notice that it matched the one on his, no one said anything. Normally marks were more of a dialogue – first words weren’t often identical.

Then again, anyone watching the way they moved across the ice couldn’t help but let the thought linger in the back of their mind. There was something about their connection and their synchronicity that shone through, even when those two small words were all that had passed between them.

* * *

As children, it didn’t matter. Fate wasn’t really high on their list of priorities. Scott focused on hockey scores and Timbits, Tessa on ballet and school, and even as they got older and they turned that focus and determination to training, to endurance – to _winning_ – they made a choice, unspoken but understood, that, for now, their fate was victory. Moving to Waterloo, then Canton, that was all necessary, the rest could wait.

But even so, they found themselves avoiding saying the word to other people. Everyone else got a ‘hello’, ‘hey’ or ‘how’s it going?’ (and for two of Scott’s particularly challenging pre-teen years a ‘sup’).

They said it to each other though. It seemed wrong not to. They didn’t acknowledge it as anything other than a greeting, but it was. It was theirs.

But then it all changed.

* * *

He fucked up.

He kept telling himself that he was only twenty-one, that he wasn’t supposed to know how to deal with all of this. But the truth was he was scared, and he was lonely, and he was _angry._ For eleven years, whenever he’d reached out for her she was reaching back, but now there was nothing there to hold, and their future, which months before had been so clear, was now hazy; it wasn’t the two of them charging fiercely into victory anymore, it was him desperately trying to make a partner out of a broomstick and her laying in a bed, unable to walk, let alone skate.

He wanted nothing more than to get into his car, drive to London, and collapse beside her in that bed until she could get out of it. But he didn’t. He told himself that she could reach out too, that she could make an effort, that he was struggling just as much as she was, but some part of him knew that that wasn’t true at all.  

He…fucked up.

But he didn’t truly realize just how badly until the day she got back. He watched her climb gingerly out of her mother’s car in front of the rink, every inch of him feeling simultaneously soothed by her presence and terrified at the cold look in her eye.

“Hi.” Somehow the word came out sounding both like an apology and an accusation.

For a moment she just stared back at him, and he was struck by the feeling that he was looking at a stranger. Tessa – _his_ Tessa – was gone.

She pushed past him through the front doors, giving him a crisp, “Hello.”

It was like a punch to the stomach.

He had really, really fucked up.

* * *

She didn’t say it back until Vancouver.

He’d made a habit of saying it to her as often as he could; he didn’t apologize, and never admitted that what he’d done was wrong (not then, at least) but he didn’t stop saying it. He knew he just had to wait her out – she would come back, she _had_ to come back. There was no other option, he knew her, it was only a matter of time.

Years later, he was able to recognize just how close he really had come to losing her entirely. Arrogance led him to think that he knew what she would do when she didn’t know herself – and she made sure to tell him so.

(“Our careers were literally built on trust falls, Scott. You always say you’ve never dropped me, but you did then.”)

Then, in what felt both like an eternity and the blink of an eye, they were standing atop the podium, gold medals around their necks, and he was wrapping his arms around her, feeling her nestle her face into his shoulder.

She inhaled deeply and on her soft exhale she said it, so quiet he almost thought he had imagined it, but then she looked up at him and his breath caught in his throat. She was back – her green eyes warm, inviting, and impossibly, painfully, _open_.

He tightened his hold on her and said it back, pressing his cheek to her hair. He hoped it was penance enough for everything that had happened – and not happened – between them.

It wasn’t.

* * *

When she finally told him that she needed another surgery, he wasn’t surprised. He had been preparing for it since the day she had stepped back on the ice that first time, pain etched across her face, refusing to let him support her and pushing herself too hard, too fast.

He was ready. Things were going to be different this time, and he told her so as soon as the words left her mouth. She didn’t quite believe him; he could see it in the guarded look in her eyes, and the hesitancy in her touch when he reached for her hand. On one hand, he understood it, but couldn’t help but feel the sting at her lack of faith in him. When they were younger, that was never something he had to question, but now the little girl with the hidden crush and trusting eyes really was gone.    

The day before the surgery he told her ridiculous jokes to distract from the gnawing hunger in her stomach when she couldn’t eat and let her win every board game they could unearth in the Virtue’s basement.

That night he followed her upstairs without a second thought, crawled into bed with her, and held her trembling body against his, letting her cry out her fear and anger against his chest.

He held her hand as she walked into the hospital, flinched and looked away when they put in her IV, pretending he didn’t see her knowing smirk, and as they wheeled her from the room he reached for her, letting his thumb rub softly against the mark on her arm as she passed.

Hours later, he sat in the recovery room staring at her still form. There was something terrifyingly absent about her in that moment, and he found himself looking for anything in her that he recognized. Even at her quietest, Tessa expressed herself with her body, but now he couldn’t help but see her as a shell, some strange glitch that looked like her but wasn’t her at all. It sent a chill up his spine and he couldn’t tear his gaze away from her face, waiting for her to be Tessa again.

Then, with a slight whimper and a flicker of her eyelids, she was.

Kate leaned over her with a watery smile and Jordan called for the nurse, but he could tell by the tension in Tessa’s body that something wasn’t right.

He stood quickly, stepping forward into her eye line.

The tightness in his chest released when her gaze found him, but even through the haze of the anesthesia and pain medicine he saw a flash of relief in her eyes. He tried not to let the fact that she still doubted him, even after everything he had done to earn back her trust, hurt, but the feeling lodged in his chest like shrapnel. That sliver would only grow in the months and years to come, twisting tendrils of resentment and frustration into his ribs, but in that moment there was only one thing he could do.

He leaned forward to kiss her forehead. “Hi,” he whispered softly against her skin.

Closing her eyes, she said it back, her voice rough and thick.

* * *

Sochi was a thousand different kinds of difficult.

They marched into the Games, heads high, the two of them against the world, letting only each other see how beaten down and stripped raw they really were. They had managed to retain their fight and determination, that inherent drive to win, and that was just enough to keep them standing.

Then, when even victory was taken from them, they grabbed onto the only thing they had left – each other.

Bitter, angry, and more than a little drunk, they rushed headlong across the line they had previously only toed, and in the harsh light of Russian morning, he pulled and she pushed and when they came out the other side something had broken between them.

That night he said it to Kaitlyn in front of Tessa.

* * *

After Sochi, Tessa went out of her way to say it to other people. She threw herself into a life outside of skating as fiercely as she had a life devoted to it. She was everywhere – school, business, travel, fun, freedom, and even as he felt the sharp sting of realization that her life seemed to be so much better the less he was in it, he couldn’t blame her. They had watched as everything they had built burned, and he had to admit that part of him was also enjoying his dance through the ashes.

It wasn’t ideal to start a relationship as a rebound from the implosion of a confusing and unexplainable sixteen-year non-relationship with your best friend, business partner, and possible soulmate –  but somehow, he’d ended up in something…nice. Where things with Tessa were sharp and meaningful at every turn, full of passion and determination and ambition, this was comfort and rounded edges, lazy weekends and a beer at sunset. He started to wonder if maybe he’d had it wrong all along. After all, their marks fit. Just because his first word had left his mouth in spite didn’t mean that it was meaningless.

Or that’s what he told himself, burying that profound feeling of absence as deeply as he could; losing Tessa wasn’t the reason he felt like he was missing a limb, it had to be the skating, he _needed_ it to be the skating, the sudden lack of the thrill of competition and the satisfaction of victory.  

And, in the end, it wasn’t like he’d truly lost her, they still talked, and they skated, they just weren’t Tessa and Scott anymore; they were Tessa. And Scott.

But, no matter how much he fought it, as they clawed their way back from the pieces that Sochi and Marina had left them of them, he started to feel that pull deep in his stomach, the one that knew what Tessa was feeling without a word spoken between them, the one that felt like the other end of a string that tied him to her, reeling him in again and again. Some days it felt like an old friend, sometimes it felt like a virus, and either way it hurt.

So he drowned that feeling in beer and hockey and Kaitlyn and It almost worked –  

At least until Scotland.

* * *

It would have been easier if Tessa and Kaitlyn hadn’t gotten along. But as they walked ahead of him, laughing cheerily and talking loudly about, well, mostly anything but him, he felt his stomach twist. The sound of Kaitlyn’s laughter filled him something like a comfortable hum below his skin, but Tessa’s…that was a whole different story. Her laugh – that loud, unapologetic guffaw – filled his mind with seventeen years of green eyes sparkling with mirth and sent chills up his spine.

But even then, he’d pushed through it. In Russia she had shoved at him, both physically and mentally, and now, when even the nearness of her tugged roughly at him, he resisted. Tessa wasn’t pulling at him intentionally. If anything she was doing her best to shove him at Kaitlyn, making it very clear just how okay she was with the entire situation.

And he’d almost believed her, until the last night and that fucking song. 

The bar was crowded and loud but filled with laughter and a soft melodic soundtrack provided by the band on stage. With Kaitlyn pressed to his side and a beer in his hand, Scott felt a strange kind of peace. They had had a good night – good food, good company – and he had begun to think that things might actually be okay. Tessa was giving him every chance to choose a life with Kaitlyn, and she seemed happy (though ‘seemed’ was the operative word). It wasn’t the life he had pictured, but maybe fate was teaching him a lesson. 

Then the music shifted. It was small, like a twitch or a hiccup, but palpable. 

As Scott breathed in the change, trying to define it, the lyrics of the song being sung filtered into his mind. 

 _you must understand though the touch of your hand makes my pulse react_  

The words themselves caused his breath to catch in his throat, but the raw, stripped down arrangement and the clear emotion behind every word sung nearly knocked him over. 

 _you must try to ignore that it means more than that_  

He turned, still able to know intuitively where she was in a room, regardless of what was happening between them, and found her already looking back at him. As the rest of the song unfolded around them, he found himself unable to look away, his gaze locked to hers even as he couldn’t quite figure out what she was thinking. Part of it he knew was ‘we have to skate to this,’ but there was something else, something hidden, something buried.

 _i’ve been taking on a new direction, but i have to say, i’ve been thinking about my own protection, it scares me to feel this way_  

And there it was - a flicker. Something shifted, just for a moment, in Tessa’s face, and his stomach dropped. He didn’t know what it meant, but he knew, without question, that she wasn’t okay and it tilted his world on its axis. 

She looked away first, turning her attention back to whatever conversation she had left, and he found himself staring at her profile, willing her to come back, to just tell him, whatever it was. 

He felt Kaitlyn’s hand tighten around his hip, pulling him from his daze. She smiled up at him, her smile faltering at the shaken look on his face. She raised a questioning eyebrow, and he cleared his throat, summoned the smile he had used for almost every press conference since he was a teenager, and re-entered the conversation he had left when the song had started. 

But, undeniably, part of him was elsewhere, lost to the girl across the room whose smile didn’t quite reach her eyes.

* * *

Hours later, when he and Kaitlyn were curled up in bed, watching late night television in what would have been a warm haze of comfort if Scott could shake that hollow feeling in his stomach, she lightly dragged a finger across his mark. Without thinking, he recoiled, snatching his arm away quickly. She looked up at him, eyes wide and hurt, and he hurriedly tried to play it off as though it had tickled, giving her a sloppy kiss to the cheek before standing up and heading for the bathroom.

She hadn’t believed him, and for good reason. She had touched his mark before, but not with such tenderness, almost as though she had really let herself believe that things were going to be okay in the end. But in his mind, he couldn’t shake the feeling that that gentle touch was a betrayal, that he was somehow being unfaithful to Tessa.

When he stepped out of the bathroom, Kaitlyn was curled up on her side, facing away from him. He sighed, pondering exactly how to fix this particular fuckup – they really were piling up these days – when something out the window caught his eye.

Tessa was perched on a rock near the cliffs, head down, her hair blowing wildly in the wind and arms wrapped tightly around herself. Quietly, he pulled on his shoes and slipped from the room, refusing to look back at Kaitlyn. If he never knew for sure that she was awake, he could convince himself that everything was fine.   

He made his way down the stairs and pushed through the doors, walking toward her slowly, less to avoid startling her - she already knew he was there anyway - and more to give her time to tell him to leave.

When he got close enough to see how tightly her fingers were gripping her arms, her cheeks pink with cold, he tentatively called out, “Tess?”

She dropped her head down further, burrowing her face into the hem of her sweater. He stepped towards her and she shifted her face away from him. She only did that if she was –

“Why are you crying?”

She didn’t answer.

“T, come on.”

With a sniffle, she lifted her head and looked at him. His breath caught in his throat at the vulnerability in her eyes, and he realized that the last time he’d seen this far beyond her veneer of sociable positivity, she’d been coming apart beneath him, wide-eyed and exposed. For a moment they just looked at each other. Then, softly, brokenly, she said, “Hi.”

He felt it like a punch to the stomach, and without another thought, he said it back, as easy as breathing.

With a defeated laugh, she stood. He took a tentative step toward her, but she gave a quick shake of her head and stopped. For a moment, they fell back to themselves, silently letting their eyes and their history speak for itself.

With a sad smile, she stepped forward, pushing past him with a soft, “I can’t, I’m sorry.”

He didn’t turn to watch her go, and even though she’d ended with ‘can’t’ and ‘sorry,’ she had started with ‘hi’ and it lit a flicker of hope in his chest.

* * *

That flicker of hope for Tessa meant that any spark for Kaitlyn was extinguished. With the passing weeks, the balance of his time and energy shifted, the scale tilting strongly in Tessa’s favor. From the beginning of his relationship with Kaitlyn, he had insisted that it wasn’t a matter of choosing between them, that Tessa and Kaitlyn meant different things to him and they fulfilled separate needs, and to some extent that was true. But when it came down to the choice between Tessa and...anything, the answer was always, irrevocably, inevitably, painfully Tessa.

Kaitlyn disappeared with a pained smile and pitying eyes, and before he even realized what was happening his days were once again full of green eyes, a booming laugh, and the comfortable rhythm of trying to reset his heartbeat to sync up with hers.  

And then, they danced – and not just on the ice. They danced around their words, never saying anything out loud about Scotland or about the energy that been reignited between them and how it all funneled into what looked like a comeback, but they inched toward it just the same. He had no doubt that she was ready, that she was all in, and if she was, then so was he. He just needed to get her to say it, to make the choice, to choose _them_ again.

The beginning of August found them bustling through China, spinning through the lyrics of “How Will I Know” and pretending it didn’t echo anything happening off the ice. A skill they hadn’t expected to need back when they were in single digits but had become in increasingly handy with every year that passed.

But as their time in China marched on, the anticipation built, and, on the back of weeks of almost-maybe-what if, it was about to drive Scott out of his mind. He’d done everything he could think of to try and get her to break, but she resisted every time, her defiant green eyes masking the soft yearning he knew she felt because he felt it too. The thing people didn’t understand about Tessa was that that glimmer of defiance, that air of boldness, that was the key to Tessa Virtue. Her image was fueled by a carefully constructed assumption of innocence, that wide-eyed girl next door grin, Canada’s sweetheart in a white dress, but what most people didn’t understand was that Tessa, the real Tessa, was much closer to Carmen than she was to Mahler. She was ambitious, and she was smart, and she was always, _always_ in control.

It was halfway through their hike along the Great Wall when he finally snapped. She had just dodged another of his carefully aimed hints with a flicker of a smirk, and that was the tipping point.   

“For fucks sake, Tessa!”

She froze and look at him in surprise. “What?”

“You are exhausting!”

“Excuse me?” she replied.

“Enough, okay? You’re in, I’m in, this is happening.”

“ _What_ is happening?” she asked.

He looked to the sky, a deep breath and an attempt to count to ten the only thing between him and the snappy retort that a younger Scott would have given. When he looked back at her, she was hiding a smile.  

“No, don’t you dare laugh at me. This isn’t cute, okay? I can’t do anything else, I already got you a bucket of rice, I am out of ideas – HI OKAY? _HI_. Jesus.”

She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Okay.”

“Okay?”

“Okay.”

“You’re really going to leave me hanging like that?”

She sighed, a smile quirking at the edges of her lips. “Hi.”

“Thank you.” He took her hand, intertwining his fingers with hers, and they continued on their way. Most people didn’t understand that Tessa was always in control, but he did - and that was exactly why he could take it from her.

* * *

After that, they don’t say it. It doesn’t take long for him to realize that he’s saving it, and while he won’t fully admit to what for (the superstitious skater in him taking the reins), he is. And he hopes that she is too.  

Even so, he finds that it’s on the tip of his tongue every day as he becomes reacquainted with this new version of Tessa. She had always been strong, almost to a fault really, but now she simmered with a self-assurance that before had hidden insecurity even in the face of her ambition; now it was backed by such intensity and confidence that it made him both hard and weak at the same time.  

One morning, somewhere in the middle of her relearning how to exist before sunrise, he gently pulled a particularly cranky Tessa from her tangle of sheets, hiding a smile as she stumbled into the bathroom without saying a word. Ten minutes later, she trudged past him into the kitchen, eyes only for the pot of coffee brewing on the counter, nothing to spare for him. He chuckled as he realized that in the morning she likely considered him nothing more than her barista, and the word nearly tumbled out.  

“H- “, he managed to stop himself before the vowel could slip past his lips. Then, “Hello, sunshine.”

Tessa turned to look at him, a knowing smile on her face at his stutter. “What was that?”

“Just saying hello. Isn’t that what you’re supposed to do in the morning?”

“Right,” she said, her eyes bright. “Well hello to you.”

“Hello.”

“You said that already.”

“It bears repeating,” he grinned.

“It’s a greeting,” she responded. “Does it really need to be repeated so many times?”

He smiled at her, warmth spreading through his chest at the look on her face.

“Yes,” he said softly.

“Okay,” she replied simply, a slight blush gracing her cheeks as she turned back to the coffeemaker.

“Okay,” he said, bringing his cup to his lips. “Glad we cleared that up.”

* * *

Filming the comeback video was nothing more than an exercise in self-control. Their PR strategy called for passion and intensity, and they had no trouble supplying it. He tangled his fingers in her hair as she knelt before him, cupped her face in his hands and felt the strength of muscle beneath those delicate features, watched her press herself into the wall, back arched, head back, arms up and he was certain that the word would have slipped out had he been able to catch his breath.

* * *

The closest she comes to saying it is at World’s.

They had finally found their footing after years of faltering, and he’d lost it again. He didn’t see it coming and it rocked him to the core. He pulled himself together, for Tess, always for Tess, and put everything he had into the rest of the program. But in the end, as she held him to her chest, both of them breathing heavily, he felt himself shutting down. All of the progress that he had made, the tools, the lines of communication, began to blink out of existence, one by one, in his mind. 

But then he felt it. Her nails dug into his shoulder and her thumb rubbed roughly across his ear. She was grounding him, reminding him to stay _present_. She was doing the only thing she could in that moment to keep him from disappearing back into the Scott of years past who would blow up at her when he was really angry at himself, before hiding away and letting it eat away at him.  

Then she was on her feet and he was on his knees before her and he couldn’t do anything but look at her, and hold onto that warm, desperate, open look on her face, and then he was on his feet and she was panting and launching herself at him, a hand to his face, holding onto him like she could physically save him from himself. 

He doesn’t remember taking their bows, doesn’t remember skating to the boards or making his way to the kiss and cry, he just remembers the relief that he’d felt as their names moved back into the top slot, the sound of Tessa’s quick, heavy breaths, and the continuous stream of touches that she used to keep him out of his head and in the moment.

It isn’t until later that he realizes that Tessa wasn’t just trying to catch her breath with those rapid exhales and inhales - she was stopping herself from saying it, again and again and again and again. 

* * *

And then, somehow, suddenly, finally, they’d done it. They had actually fucking _done_ it. Everything was cheers and hugs and tears and a blur of red and white waving wildly. It felt like the world around him had imploded into nothing but noise and color, and the only stable point in sight was that sliver of maroon fabric and pale skin ahead of him.     

He pushed his way through the tarp after her and felt Patch pull it down roughly behind them, muffling the screams of the crowd and shutting out the rest of the world.

She turned to look at him, her face a picture of uninhibited elation – and then she _laughed_. She laughed that big, deep, genuine loud laugh of hers and he was undone. He stumbled towards her, clutching her grinning, trembling face in his hands, and kissed her firmly, her teeth clashing against his lips as he pressed them to hers again and again.

She wrapped her arms around his neck tightly, and he felt her laugh again against his mouth as the tears on her cheeks smeared across his skin.

He pulled back to look at her, and he knew that it was time.

“Hi,” he said throatily. It was exactly like every other time that he’d said it, and nothing like it at all. Adrenaline thrummed in his veins at their victory and the inevitability of what he’d said and where they were.

She looked up at him; he could feel the beat of her pulse against the hand he had resting gently on her throat. He felt her scratch along the fabric of his forearm, where they both knew the word was etched across his skin, felt her nails digging into him, marking him even more than was already.

Her chest rose and fell in heavy breaths, and in her eyes he saw her flicker from nervous seven year old girl to the raw, emotional ball of chaos she’d been in Sochi, bouncing between every shade of herself from the last twenty years before settling back into the complex, confident, ambitious woman standing before him.

Gazing at him with shining, wild eyes, she let the word slip from her lips, not a whisper or a sigh, but a declaration backed by the certainty in what he had just given her and what she was giving back to  him –

“Hi.”


End file.
